Your Mail 9-11-13: Save Alexandria's post offices ... 'Outliers' not needed in 5th District ... Paving the way for Hillary?

Save our post offices

For those people who use the post office on Government Street in Alexandria:

Please, contact your senators and representatives in Washington, D.C., concerning the proposed closing of that post office and the one downtown on Murray Street.

Both are essential to the larger part of the city; and they serve senior citizens and others, who have no other place to go to for their postal needs, such as receiving and sending important mail.

Everyone depends on these two places that have served so long. The post office on Odum Street near North Bolton Avenue is in a bad place to get to, for people to try to get there, and the parking is limited.

Poor management of funds is the reason for the proposed closing of the two post offices mentioned above.

The Postal Service should consider cutting Saturday delivery and even raising the rates some. It also should investigate the spending of income being received and not used right. I have had a P.O. box for about 40 years, on Bank Drive, and then it moved to the present location.

Please, tell me what people are going to do about mailing and receiving their mail! This is a needed service for everyone, regardless of where you reside!

Please, take action to prevent this from taking place.

Thank you for listening.

Mary Geddie, Alexandria

'Outliers' not needed

Within the 14 who qualified and are challenging to become the U.S. congressman to replace Rep. Rodney Alexander, two of them are not residents of the 5th Congressional District; and in fact are quite distant from it.

Weldon Russell, Democrat, is from Amite; and Elliot Barron, Green Party, is from New Orleans.

According to state law, anyone can be qualified to run in a U.S. congressional district, regardless of where he or she lives. In this case, these two live a substantial distance outside of the very large 5th District.

For such a large district, that seems to make it much more problematical to address any sort of attention to the concerns of residents within the district boundaries.

Obviously, these fellows think that residents of the 5th district need to look outside the borders for the best candidate; and that they offer a better choice.

The realization that two of them are "residential outliers" occurred to a couple of us after the Pineville Candidates Forum on the Sept. 5.

I think that one of the candidates living within the district can be an effective new U.S. congressman; and the field of candidates is effectively 12.

Bill Wieger, Ball

Paving the way for Hillary?

Twelve years ago today, Sept. 11, America was shaken to its roots by a cowardly attack mainly centered in New York City, and including Alexandria, Va.

Within a very short time our intelligence apparatus was able to identify the 19 Islamic terrorists on the planes and the one terrorist who did not make the flight. We knew where they were born, where they were educated, and which ones came here to take the minimum pilot lessons to fly a plane already in the air. The FBI had interviewed family members and neighbors. Arrests of financial contributors began. We had airport security video showing some of them passing through the airport in Boston. We traced their terrorist training to camps in Afghanistan and prepared military responses.

Sept. 1 is not only the 12th anniversary of that awful day, but it is the first anniversary of the terrorist attack on our diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

After a year of dithering and foot-dragging the investigative committees of Congress are still in a wrestling match with the Obama administration over who will or will not be allowed to testify and what documents will be released. Ironically, current CIA Director John Brennan announced today that his agency would provide expanded file information to the appropriate committees. That's comical since Brennan was a White House counter-terrorism adviser last year who help develop the strategy for withholding information.

One is left to wonder why was so much information made available so quickly in 2001 but there is such a lack of transparency over another terrorist attack in 2012. One obvious observation regarding the 2012 attack is that not only was it embarrassing to have it occur on the 9/11 anniversary but it was also less than two months before the November presidential election. OK, I'll allow for that connection but the election has been over for 10 months and President Obama has no future re-election to be concerned with. Could it be that he's trying to protect the viability of future candidates such as Hillary Clinton who was secretary of state when the attack occurred?

Robert B. FergusonPineville

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Your Mail 9-11-13: Save Alexandria's post offices ... 'Outliers' not needed in 5th District ... Paving the way for Hillary?

For those people who use the post office on Government Street in Alexandria: